SKG was prepared for this, and their intention has been to join up with the group putting together the new Digital Fairness Act, since the objective there is very similar, but much broader in scope, and most of the groundwork is already there. Much of the earlier recorded Q&A sessions in Parliament had representatives commenting on this already, so it's the natural approach. This way, legislation will almost certainly be put forward and voted on, and the lobby groups will likely have a harder time trying to wrestle with a larger movement and a parliament that seems sympathetic to the cause.
Basically, this is a battle lost that never really mattered. The climax of this war is yet to come.
The industry should only be allowed to comment after the laws have been written and fulfill the goals of European citizens.
To ask the fox to guard the hen house is killing democracy.
It's about balancing the interests of people who pay their rent and feed their children by selling games, and the interests of people who merely enjoy games.
Consulting only the group which enjoys games would be absurd to the point of being actively malicious.
Someone arguing the opposite position would be a corporate shill pushing for regulatory capture. Everyone who disagrees with you is always a corporate shill.
The government should give everyone free gasoline, everyone who says otherwise is a corporate shill only working to protect their profits!
How so? What's immature about the desire to keep games functional?
There’s also the fact that through events like Gamergate, the term “gamer” has become highly charged and is not something most adults would want to be associated with.
It’s a deeply unfortunate association. The “gamer” identity is toxic to the point where “gamer word” means “racial slur”.
I could dump you links to research detailing the connections between the online gaming community and right wing extremism, but I’m pretty sure you know what I’m talking about.
“Gamer” is basically synonymous for “neo-nazi incel”, and GSK refers to itself as a “global coalition of gamers”. That’s a pretty bad look!
Are you really going to tell me that the average gamer is just as bad as the average internet user?
It’s kind of hilarious to be having this conversation with “ептсука”, certainly a fitting name for someone who would defend gamers as nice people.
No, it's not, and this is why you were called a shill .. not merely due to a disagreement, but due to you actively portraying your opposition as malicious, while you actively describe multi-billion dollar corporations as just people trying to "pay their rent and feed their children by selling games"
Deeply dishonest indeed.
It's extremely difficult to see how the statement quoted below is not fairly characterized as malicious
>The industry should only be allowed to comment after the laws have been written and fulfill the goals of European citizens.
If the opposition simply seeks to silence you, rather than to argue against you, how are they not malicious?
The other person is arguing that those two entities are not equal and should not have equal weight in affecting the decisions of the European commission.
Calling them malicious for having a different view of the _purpose_ of the commission is kind of wrong (it's independent of being malicious), and from the outside just makes you look dishonest.
Where exactly are you getting this from? Why are you attributing this to me, or anyone? There's not a single commenter here arguing this point of view, only some windmill-tilters arguing against it.
Because you wrote:
> If the opposition simply seeks to silence you, rather than to argue against you, how are they not malicious?
in response to:
> The industry should only be allowed to comment after the laws have been written and fulfill the goals of European citizens.
Where it's clear from your framing of an "opposition trying to silence you" that you think the industry lobby has at least some right to be heard before the council votes on policy. Which is something the statement you are replying to clearly doesn't agree with. And rather than accept that there is a disagreement of the purpose of the council or the acceptability of industry lobbyists influencing law or what not, you just frame it as a moral evil (maliciousness) on the part of the other commenter. A good faith reading of the comment you replied to has so many non-malicious interpretations.
Side note: if your comment implies something hard enough (intentionally or not) that multiple people are "windmill-tilting" against something that you think you aren't saying, it deserves some reflection on whether you may have miscommunicated your point.
This is an inherent feature of democracy. "The industry" consists entirely of people, of course you can't exclude them.
>A good faith reading of the comment you replied to has so many non-malicious interpretations.
"Let's not allow rich people to participate in the political process" has just as many possible non-malicious interpretations as "Let's not allow black people to participate in the political process". i.e. none
And even above I'm steelmanning by assuming that Frieren didn't want to also exclude indie developers.
Yes.
The balance is that everyone's free speech has already been SEVERELY restricted in order for the game industry to have a business model at all. This is about making sure that the rest of our society actually gets a remotely fair deal. Asking that companies can't just take away what they have sold is really below the bare minimum.
You're aware that they are taxed products that people buy with their wages, right?
I mean, we only spend money when we believe that what we buy with it is more valuable than the money we've spent, so there is some underlying activity or follow up to spending the money that naturally follows otherwise, the buyer would perceive no benefit and would not buy again
So how are you equating collection and enjoyment of your purchase as the same?
This essentially amounts to government intervention to reduce the already incredibly cheap cost per hour of these activities for a small minority of gamers. Is that good public policy?
Yes, because you will not be limited in time to enjoy a single title. Like it's the case with other media - books, music, movies, etc. This is good because future people (who haven't even been born yet) will be able to enjoy the same slice of entertainment that we enjoy right now. Just like we can still enjoy games made 40 years ago.
Perhaps the audience that would consume these old games simply won't be big enough.
The reason why publishers don't do this is also very clear - they want us to play their newer games and spend money there. They are not doing this because it's hard for me. They just want to maximize the profit, that's it.
We're only consumers when we consume, but that is not the extent of our participation in society. To optimize for consumption is a shortcut to certain doom.
> But saying that the costs of giving the game to community are tremendous is simply misguided
Tremendous, no. Significant? Yes. The cost could very well be in the millions for a single project, but how many hours of gameplay does that actually buy? Do those later hours come at a significantly increased cost?
>The reason why publishers don't do this is also very clear - they want us to play their newer games and spend money there. They are not doing this because it's hard for me. They just want to maximize the profit, that's it.
I get why someone who plays games would want this. But as someone who doesn't play games, why on earth would I want to encourage this? It defies most basic economic theory.
You're suggesting a subsidy for gamers which everyone else would to pay for in the form of slower economic activity and lower tax revenues. I do not want to subsidize your games.
How did you come to this number? Something simple like giving the binaries with docs doesn't cost that much money. I'm not sure what you are referring to.
> how many hours of gameplay does that actually buy?
You seem to confuse the cost of continued support with the cost of giving it to the community. Nobody is asking publishers to continue support when they don't want to.
> But as someone who doesn't play games, why on earth would I want to encourage this?
You are not expected to support this if you don't care about it... But don't act surprised when you find out that some people do play games and they do care about them.
> You're suggesting a subsidy for gamers which everyone else would to pay for
No, that's not how it works. Not even close.
>No, that's not how it works. Not even close.
As far as I can tell, legislation which enables you to play a game in perpetuity instead of for a limited time will likely reduce the amount of tax revenue your gaming-related activities generate.
A useful metric to focus on here is the cost per hour of entertainment. The price of the game itself might stay the same, but the cost of your gaming itself would be subsidized.
How so? If I'm sure that a game is not going to die, I will be more willing to pay for it. The more such games exist, the more money I will be willing to spend on them. Hence more taxes from me. Otherwise I will stick to older games that don't have this problem, which will bring less taxes from me because of the cost.
> cost of your gaming itself would be subsidized
By whom? I know there are currently tax returns (or exemptions is more correct term probably) for gaming companies. But how does having end of life plans change this?
The people building games wouldn't be contributing anything if the players weren't playing/buying them.
I assume the idea isn't that developing a game means you don't get to vote as a citizen, but that the industry can't lobby for special access ("spent virtually all of their time with the gaming industry lobby groups").
if there are no players, there is no money to be made, developers will be fired.
and besides, I'd rather put someone on the street if this is the multibillionaire CEO that exploits his devs, than a dev itself. And companies can, you know, slash their billionaire salaries and bonuses to comply with the law.
It would be absurd to disregard those costs and not consult the industry on them when writing laws like this.
We also have votes, but unfortunately getting people to consider this sort of issue while casting their ballot¹ is rather difficult. Getting people to vote for the bigger picture for their benefit and that of us all doesn't work well as they are far more likely to vote on a single issue that has been in the news recently and whoever they vote for will u-turn on once in control anyway…
--------
[1] or even getting them to care at all, in the case of European elections [not that this is directly relevant here because of spit brexit].
A lot of things are "impossible" until they become legally required, at which point it's just business as usual.
> and a lot of the time when servers start getting turned off the team that could do this work has been dissolved or are working on other things
Which is why we need a legal requirement - so that companies plan ahead for this.
That is precisely why the SKG initiative mandates it - so that it's available from the start because it's a legal requirement. Without that, you have no financial nor legal incentive and you end up exactly like you mention - reassigning or dissolving the team.
"buy" is doing some heavy lifting here. If I buy something, it is mine. If someone else can arbitrarily take it away or stop it working, then it was mis-sold, because what I've really done is rent for an indeterminate period of time. What should be clear up front is whether I'm buying or renting.
They're not stupid, there has been a lot of groundwork for this over the past 10+ years.
but they are keeping to that. unfortunately
They have this very cushy setup where they triple insulate themselves from risk while publishing games that have less snowballs chance in hell of matching their expectations (next HoK, Genshin Impact, PUBG, LOL, minecraft, fortnite, roblox, WoW).
I and a million others think the software industry needs to move past their infant stage and start taking their own products seriously. Frankly it's shocking regulation didn't come in the 00s.
>If you don’t like games that require a server to function don’t buy them, that’s a choice that can be made.
You also have a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem. People DON'T buy the game, they ARE voting with their wallet. You are doing the equivalent of telling people "If you don't like abandoned wells you shouldn't drive." We like the gushers, you should just pay the actual cost of drilling instead of passing those off on society. That all people would/should stop playing live service games because of the relatively small cost of dead games is just as ridiculous.
" What isn’t realistic is stamping their feet and demanding that companies make it possible for people to run their own servers for live service games, just the licensing issues are going to be a nightmare to solve"
Like....what licencing issues? After the game is "dead" and the parent company doesn't want to support it anymore, we could easily release the source code or even just the executables for the servers. There's nothing complicated about it, it's just some windows executables with a whole load of config files to tell them what to serve and how. I once had to go to a gaming conference with a really basic laptop to setup a local-only version of our servers to host some private lobby of the game - it took all of 30 minutes to set it up. But oh no, players can't have that because what, it's too complicated?
Like, as someone who actually wrote some of these servers for various services in these games, I really don't buy this entire argument that it can't be done. If anything, it's just the people at the top who have no idea about tech dragging their feet and coming up with implausible "what if" scenarios as to why it can't be done. For at least 3 of the games I worked on I could give you a zip file with all the files and you'd have the servers up and running within an hour, given powerful enough hardware. And then what, we can't change the servers the clients connect to? Please. Modders would have that done within 24 hours of release, probably with a nice GUI for players to use.
>> that could do this work has been dissolved or are working on other things.
Yes, and their help isn't needed with any of it, the game is by definition dead at this point, the alternative is the publisher shutting everything down and no one ever playing it again.
>>If you don’t like games that require a server to function don’t buy them, that’s a choice that can be made.
It's not just about consumer choice - it's also about us losing part of the culture that cannot be restored once shut down.
I say that wholeheartedly as someone who has worked on games that are(for the time being) still online. And in few years they will be inevitably shut down, leading to years of my life and effort being inaccessible to anyone - the only way that you will be able to experience it is through Youtube videos. That's a cultural tragedy, and I'm 10000% for companies being forced through law to include it in their design that _eventually_ the servers have to be released to the public. They don't have to offer any support whatsoever, the communities will figure it out, guaranteed.
I can't speak to the parent's stance, but more generally this would be referring to IP licensing and patent encumbrance. I've worked on a number of large systems where non-trivial parts of the codebase were licensed from external parties with distribution restrictions in place. Even the executable versions would be problematic as the contracts go to great lengths to lock it down to strictly company XYZ may modify and use the IP, but nothing else regardless of the form or means of distribution.
Releasing said systems as-is would require either relicensing to allow distribution (very costly and potentially impossible if the vendor declines), or replacing that functionality with a cleanroom implementation. Which is both costly, time consuming and difficult. You may also run into further issues there if the contract forbids cloning functionality, or even worse: if there is patent encumbrance you have to go back to the relicensing option.
The modder base will reimplement the licensed stuff, if needed.
1) companies get to release broken, incomplete source under the banner of commercial licensing restrictions.
2) truly upstanding companies (/s) will use this as a loophole to block the majority of their source as commercially licensed by stuffing it all under related companies and licensing it back to themselves. e.g. Company A selling game licenses majority of source (say, the entire server platform) from Company B -> Company B can't be compelled to release their engine because they aren't selling the game.
#1 would be an annoyance through to major challenge depending on the scale, #2 seems a more likely outcome for the major players as they can afford to play that sort of game and get away with it.
To be clear, I think this law should be implemented. However it would be pointless to pretend that licensing constraints won't add significant complexity, and many inventive pathways to highly evasive yet technically compliant outcomes.
The commission is defined by councils and policy from each member state. Many member states send their right wing nuts so there is a bigger picture than just "corrupt".
Think about it: how you would implement such directive and make it implementable... Now you see the problem.
It's worth noting that they don't mandate a particular plan. A solution can take many forms - multiplayer games could have servers released, _or_ be given a "direct connection" method, or even have a local (no network) multiplayer option, and still be within what SKG was asking for. For singleplayer games, it's even easier, they can just have a killswitch for the "required server" components.
All of this is cheap to do, it just needs to be planned for so that when the time comes, all the tools are in place for the EOL plan to proceed.
This is how the European Union works.
You can listen to Ross' explanation in his recent video [1], it starts at 12:12
Are you sure we don't need all of this? Seems like we'd be going back to the dark ages of information technology if we did.. (/s)
(Or maybe Jason Hall is going by "Tyler" now. XD )
The gaming industry did way too much stupid shit in the last few years and just needs to take it a notch back.
> players churn on their own without social features
you say one thing but the market votes the other way. Game developers are under pressure to turn a profit. If you want a game your way, develop them yourself! Thats how I started making games for myself. Projecting or pressuring others to do so yield no productive consequence.
_some_ multiplayer games can, many can't, as they are using a cloud-based multiplayer backend that isn't easily replaceable (see other discussions in this thread). SKG makes no effort to address those differences.
- Existing games (they only aim to have regulation for newer game, as existing games may be locked into technical choices like a cloud based multiplayer backend that can't be replaced)
- Non live-service games (ergo games where you have a monthly subscription of some kind, which makes it obvious you're "renting" the game for a limited time).
Within these confines, it seems _very obvious_ to me that you can design just about any multiplayer game in a way that's compatible with SKG's desired regulations. In the vast majority of multiplayer games, you can:
- Provide a LAN multiplayer mode (most match-based FPS/strategy games can do that. Too many examples to cite.)
- Provide server binaries for self-hosted servers (Many survival games, or games with a persistent world, can do that. See v-rising for a recent example.)
- Provide a local multiplayer mode (split screen/couch coop style)
And if you don't want to go through any of that for [insert reason here], you can just make your game into a service requiring a monthly payment like WoW and you're no longer subject to the regulation!
Now, please give me an example of a game that doesn't fit within that framework if you want to continue this argument.
Most match-based FPS don't do that anymore, as it's susceptible to DDOS. Whether a LAN-like mode is otherwise still feasible/acceptable by todays game quality standards is debatable.
> Provide server binaries for self-hosted servers
This is only feasible if the multiplayer backend is a simple server binary, which in many cases it's not anymore, but a full cloud architecture you would find for any SaaS app. There additionally is the issue of licensed libraries, which may prohibit redistribution of the server binaries (and may e.g. be bound to a per-host pricing).
> Now, please give me an example of a game that doesn't fit within that framework if you want to continue this argument.
Take your pick from[0] or a competitors website: PEAK, Content Warning, Gorilla Tag; All games from indie developers that heavily rely on good networking that wouldn't be feasible to be replaced.
> you can just make your game into a service requiring a monthly payment
Ah, yes the simple option of "completely tank your playerbase".
We're talking about EOL plans here. You don't have to care about DDOS.
> This is only feasible if the multiplayer backend is a simple server binary, which in many cases it's not anymore, but a full cloud architecture you would find for any SaaS app. There additionally is the issue of licensed libraries, which may prohibit redistribution of the server binaries (and may e.g. be bound to a per-host pricing).
I have multiple issues with this framing:
1. We're talking about regulation about _future games_ that haven't been made yet. SKG doesn't want to regulate existing games. So we're not talking about retrofitting an EOL plan on games that already rely on complex backend. If you're planning for it from the get-go, getting an architecture that isn't so cloud-reliant isn't that complicated.
2. Even if we accept the premise that a game _absolutely needed_ a cloud only architecture to function for one reason or another, that doesn't prevent releasing the architecture binaries.
3. Licensed libraries may have redistribution prohibitions _today_, but should EOL regulations come in place, you'd find that those libraries would quickly move to allow redistribution for EOL purposes, as otherwise studios would just _not use them_.
> Take your pick from[0] or a competitors website: PEAK, Content Warning, Gorilla Tag; All games from indie developers that heavily rely on good networking that wouldn't be feasible to be replaced.
AFAICT, Photon Fusion is fully compliant with SKG already - it supports games where one player is the "host" and all comms are P2P. Players can direct connect to one another. While it does work better with a STUN server or with Photon's cloud, they are not *necessary* for the game to function.
Photon's Voice offering might be different, but turning that off for an EOL plan is totally acceptable according to the SKG's wanted regulation - they would fall within the same category of "extra services" that aren't part of the core game.
And _furthermore_, of the three games you cited, I know for sure that PEAK and CW are playable fully offline. They're already SKG-compliant even if photon fusion was somehow not. I haven't played Gorilla Tag or looked into it, but I think I've already made my point clear.
> Ah, yes the simple option of "completely tank your playerbase".
WoW still has active players in the millions. FF14 has a 25k peak concurrent players in the past 24h. There are other success stories. But sure, it "tanks your playerbase".
I don't know about the EU effort, but the California bill would apply to any game that is released on or after January 1, 2027. That's not enough time to plan for the "changes from the get-go."
If they're not actually allowed to sell their product, then they shouldn't pretend they're selling it. They should be clear that it's a rental by offering it as a subscription only in that case and thus not be bound by that requirement.
>
> Ah, yes the simple option of "completely tank your playerbase".
And gamers at large shouldn't pretend that they are going to be shelling out money for subscriptions. There is a reason that even most MMOs switched away from mandatory subscription pricing (apart from the outlier of WOW), and it's not to make the publishers filthy reach, but often barely viable.
"We released MyGame 3 a month ago, sales aren't looking great, announce EoL for MyGame 1 we released 6 years ago to get those bums off it." (or the more charitable version where money's tight and the AWS costs aren't helping)
The goal here is to disallow this, as it's obviously what everyone would do if allowed to.
They'd just sell every game with 1 year EoL and keep the servers running however long they feel like.
There are in total ~15-30mil paying subscriber that pay subscription fees to a single game. That's 1% of all gamers globally.
But sure, let's slap a $5/month subscription fee on all upcoming games that would have the chance to be the next Among Us / PEAK, and let's see how well that works out for indie developers.
Most indie games don't rely on servers for the gameplay loop because those are expensive and an indie studios can't afford it. They instead rely on P2P networking for the gameplay loop, and at most have a matchmaking server to both give a nice experience to find other players to play with, and to allow NAT traversal.
You can easily design a game like PEAK/AmongUs in such a way that, even if the matchmaking server is disabled, the game still works because it has a direct connection or LAN option.
PEAK is listed as an example of using the Photon Fusion Shared Authority model[0]. AFAIK Photon Fusion doesn't allow for any proper P2P in any of their network topologies (apart from the fully offline single-player mode).
[0]: https://doc.photonengine.com/photon/v1/photon-products#the-q...
Besides, PEAK has offline mode already built in, so no subscriptions needed.
Yes, single player offline. SKG is specifically about deactivating the online/multiplayer component in games, so if PEAK were to deactivate their online coop mode, they would definitely fall under it (ignoring grandfathering).
[0]: https://youtu.be/sEVBiN5SKuA?t=1967
[1]: https://youtu.be/36qDEeTDXNE?t=2378 - Statement by affiliated Pirate Party member
No, this is false. SKG also includes singleplayer games which require constant online connection.
How is LAN susceptible to DDoS? I think you're thinking of P2P, unless you're worried about your LAN buddies trolling you I guess.
Regardless, whether the quality of LAN games is good or not is wholly irrelevant to the SKG initiative. If players want to play an apparently inferior version of the game, they should be allowed to, and LAN is hardly going to be an inferior version of the game anyways.
> This is only feasible if the multiplayer backend is a simple server binary, which in many cases it's not anymore, but a full cloud architecture you would find for any SaaS app. There additionally is the issue of licensed libraries, which may prohibit redistribution of the server binaries (and may e.g. be bound to a per-host pricing).
Comparing your game to a SaaS app is an interesting approach, because SaaS apps are generally sold as subscriptions, not one-time purchases that would otherwise immply ownership. If the game is genuinely SaaS-like, maybe price it like one and stop selling it like a regular product.
Also this would only really be the case for AAA games, and they have more than enough cash to figure out a proper sunsetting strategy.
Again, it doesn't have to be a perfect experience or anything near it, as long as people can somehow keep playing the games they paid for, even if they're the ones to bear the costs of hosting (which isn't even a rare thing in gaming, there's many old games with community servers out there that to this day have healthy playerbases).
In my experience the community servers usually beat the experience on dedicated servers anyways though, modders are usually more passionate and have more freedom to make things work well than the devs do. See the shenanigans with Titanfall 2's servers as an example.
> Take your pick from[0] or a competitors website: PEAK, Content Warning, Gorilla Tag; All games from indie developers that heavily rely on good networking that wouldn't be feasible to be replaced.
The games being cited to defeat this legislation are indie titles with small userbases and tight margins. The legislation is being discussed largely because of what EA, Activision, and Ubisoft do to games with millions of paying customers. Letting the hardest edge case set the ceiling for consumer protection is a convenient outcome for the people least affected by it.
And regardless, games like Minecraft and Terraria started off as small-studio indie games that built their own networking without Photon or anything like it. The self-hosted server support is a huge part of why those communities are still thriving today, many years later. The "it's too complex without third-party services" argument is newer than the practice of indie devs doing it themselves.
> Ah, yes the simple option of "completely tank your playerbase".
The implication that informed consumers are a problem for the industry is a pretty damning admission about how the industry currently operates.
I didn't say that. Games don't to P2P anymore because it's susceptible to DDOS. LAN as alternative to Internet P2P may have seperate drawbacks (but may obviously disregard DDOS protection).
> The legislation is being discussed largely because of what EA, Activision, and Ubisoft do to games with millions of paying customers. Letting the hardest edge case set the ceiling for consumer protection is a convenient outcome for the people least affected by it.
Then propose some legislation that actually deals with that and doesn't in its communication ignore the cost of retrofitting games for all developers of games with any online component. But that's not how SKG riles up it's base of support.
> The implication that informed consumers are a problem for the industry is a pretty damning admission about how the industry currently operates.
This doesn't have anything to do with informed consumers / uninformed consumers. My comment was about the unwillingness of customers to pay for monthly subscriptions.
> consumers are a problem for the industry
They honestly are. My main reason for not going into game development is the incredible entitlement from the customerbase. I understand that situations like Control or The Crew suck, but those should be individual class action lawsuits. But instead everyone wants to impose legislation on essentially all online games, even those they purchase for less money than a coffee at Starbucks. And all that just to apparently be fine with buggy, laggy, borderline playable versions of the game, with worse matchmaking UX.
That things you bought stop working is not unique to video games with online components. I can run very few games that I bought as a child, because I don't have a CD-ROM drive or a Windows 98 machine anymore.
As it has been said many times already, the initiative does not propose any "retrofitting" for existing games.
> the incredible entitlement from the customerbase
The ability to be able to play the game in the future is not entitlement, it's a normal thing. If you car stops working because the authentication servers are down, do you consider yourself entitled as well? I hope not. Why should games be different?
> That things you bought stop working is not unique to video games with online components. I can run very few games that I bought as a child, because I don't have a CD-ROM drive or a Windows 98 machine anymore
But modern titles stop working on modern systems, so it's not comparable. We can still play older games via different means. But with games that use online connection that's not the case when the servers get shut down.
No it isn't. The cost per hour of games is already incredibly low compared to most other paid forms of entertainment.
How is it not entitled to insist that these super attractive prices should be even lower still?
> Why should games be different?
Why should games be different from a movie ticket or a streaming subscription?
How is this relevant? I still want to be able to play older games 10 years from now. The cost does not matter. I would even pay more money for the guarantee that the game will be always playable.
> How is it not entitled to insist that these super attractive prices should be even lower still?
Nobody suggests to lower the prices... Do you even understand what SKG is about?
> Why should games be different from a movie ticket or a streaming subscription?
Because you can buy movies on physical media and watch them whenever you want. With games that have online component that's not always the case anymore.
You can already do that! Contact the rightsholders and negotiate with them. It'll probably be relatively cheap to buy an EOL game.
>Nobody suggests to lower the prices... Do you even understand what SKG is about?
I'm not misunderstanding anything, you are failing to consider basic economics.
Making the product last longer is effectively indistinguishable from making it cheaper in the context of the EU.
But I do get why a bunch of people seem to dismiss SKG as "childish". I didn't start from that point of view, but the commenters here certainly have me convinced with their tunnel-vision.
We tried that. That didn't work.
> Making the product last longer
Once again, nobody is asking that. So you are misunderstanding SKG.
> tunnel-vision
That is very ironic and indeed dismissive.
Ah yes, because businesses just love to turn down free money.
>Once again, nobody is asking that. So you are misunderstanding SKG.
If SKG really does not want games to remain playable after EOL, they're certainly piss-poor communicators. I thought the whole point was to "stop killing games", i.e. make them last longer.
Unfortunately, yes. Example - try getting publishing rights to No One Lives Forever franchise (GOG already tried that). It's not rare for publishers to sit on their IPs without doing anything with them. And it's not exclusive to videogames as well.
> make them last longer
You can look at it differently. "Last longer" can mean "getting support from the publisher for longer period of time". Nobody demands this. Or it can mean "have an EOL plan", but then it's a weird way to phrase that. But yes, this meaning is the one that SKG uses.
I think it is simply the truth of the matter. The financial incentives don't line up, the rightsholders are not keeping you from playing games just because they're evil.
But I think you missed why I brought this up, I did so only because you specifically claimed that financial incentives are irrelevant in your earlier comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48582196
Regarding my comment, I already replied right there that I'm willing to pay more money for the games if it means they are preserved. You again misunderstand (probably on purpose) what it's all about...
Gaming industry is not poor (although they like to tell you that). They rack billions on exploitative mechanics like lootboxes, gachas and live services, but don't want to keep their games alive even though it would cost them a fraction of what they earn to do so. This confirms that this is not about money, at least not in the way you are trying to portrait it. Also remember that gaming companies love to evade taxes. Yeah, they are (totally not evil) entities who act with pure goodwill towards their consumers...
SKG and the people signing the petitions aren't legislators, the entire point of this initiative is to actually talk to legislators. It's not their job to propose a hyper-specific law on day 1, it's the job of the legislators to do so. And so far, it has been met with nothing but bad faith attacks on things they have never claimed to want, such as...
> ...the cost of retrofitting games ...
SKG has made it abundantly clear that they don't want any kind of law or legislation to be applied retroactively. There would be absolutely no retrofitting forced on anyone, it would only affect new games released after legislation passes. Similarly to how you didn't have to re-manufacture your old phone model to add a USB-C port into it, you don't have to do anything with your already-released games.
> ... the incredible entitlement from the customerbase
People expect to buy a product and to be able to use it however they'd like, without getting scammed and having it yanked from them down the line? How entitled of them!
> And all that just to apparently be fine with buggy, laggy, borderline playable versions of the game, with worse matchmaking UX.
Again, how is that anyone's problem other than the person who bought the game and is presumably happy to keep playing it? If it has reached EOL, then it's better the game remain playable somehow, regardless of how buggy or bad of an experience it is, than to just fully lose access to it. I'd say no experience is worse than a buggy one.
> I can run very few games that I bought as a child, because I don't have a CD-ROM drive or a Windows 98 machine anymore.
You can extremely easily emulate all of these, including on your phone, and hell Windows has native support for many games with their compatibility modes out of the gate, so yes, you could indeed play games from the 90s if you still wanted to. We've still got Doom (1993) being ported to anything that has a transistor in it to this day. In fact, looking over a list of 90s games, pretty much all of them are still playable! Monkey Island (1990!), Wolfenstein 3D ('92), Myst, the OG Warcraft, Quake is still being played competitively to this day, Civ 2, the original Diablo, the list goes on for a while and many of these games have healthy playerbases to this day.
Ever heard of GOG (Good Old Games)? It's in the name, their entire business is predicated on making retro games runnable on modern systems, and oftentimes even improving on them massively by pre-patching community patches and things of that nature.
As a sidenote, looking at lists of old games it's quite depressing how much we've lost in more recent times. I can and do still boot up games from my childhood, and many of them with vibrant & healthy communities to this day, yet there are newer games from a few short years ago that are now completely dead because the devs decided to pull the plug on them. AoE II "Enhanced" Edition doesn't even have LAN functionality without first connecting to their servers! The original game that this is a remaster of you can still play today with literally 0 issues! That is the exact issue with this crap, we're pretending like it's impossible to build games with longevity in mind when we've been doing it for the better part of 2 decades already.
The EU will view this this from the perspective of balancing the rights of its citizen workers/producers (game developers) and its citizen consumers.
2. The statements made by somewhat representative groups like the ESA showed any compromise was impossible since their whole premise is "if you don't let us kill games (which we aren't doing) then it's going to kill the industry"; the typical propaganda of "our enemies are insignificant and stupid yet the greatest threat to humanity"
3. The ESA statements were disavowed by some developers, and SKG made a point to have longer videos with developers agreeing and debunking the lies in the ESA statements already. If that's not enough, refer to point 1.
>rights of its citizen workers/producers
The whole point is that the basis of commerce is that you can't sell something and destroy it just afterwards. Sure you can have limited time subscriptions but that's not how video-games are sold. They are changing the definition based on context so they can do the most unethical things as they see fit, and as a result they are entirely destroying the industry by breaking consumer trust.
However:
> The EU will view this from the perspective of balancing the rights of its citizen workers/producers (game developers) and its citizen consumers.
How could SKG be an attack on gamedevs? What changes in the life of someone in gamedev if the online game their company has them working on provides a self-hostable server or offline functionality once they finally stop working on it?
I guess we could argue that game companies may get less revenue because users will keep playing older games that no longer produce money, and I am not keen on "perpetual games," which could impact the workers of that company... But this is a highly abusive practice. Sure, gambling makes salaries for workers around the world, but that is no excuse to keep perpetuating such an abusive industry.
This is no attack; I am genuinely curious, and I might be wrong on everything :)
Now you probably don't have a lot of empathy for big corps, but those laws often apply for small businesses as well (why wouldn't they?) and now imagine the struggling indie dev now also having to deal with another legal compliance so they won't lose their house to a legal troll, when they just struggle to get a game out there they have no idea if it's even going to ever be successful.
Anyone who gamed before 2005 knows that games do not require magic, expensive, managed remote services. We all used to run our own servers! The GameSpy era!
Pretty much every year I'm getting warnings from Apple or Google, or 3rd party SDKs, that unless I make sure to update libraries, or comply with a new rule, they are going to take down the game.
One of the latest rules was some sort of a digital services act (again another regulation) that made it very difficult for indie devs not to share their personal address and phone numbers.
In principle, as long as _you_ are not blocking using the binary on hardware that supports (i.e. a player already has it installed on an old phone), you're in the clear.
SKG is explicitly _not_ advocating for lifetime support, compatibility with new devices, etc
Being bootstrapped with no investors, there's no extra resources, and no financial benefit in making sure that the app can function well even with these 3rd party services, servers etc. not working.
Yeah, it's a good point, the law that may result from parliament does need to be clear on where the line is drawn.
Personally, I would expect singleplayer and LAN to work at EOL
Edit: on 3rd party libraries & services, I would expect that such vendors would need to make their software compliant for their customers after any law change on this front. No one is gonna buy GameLift if it's a legal liability for their EOL plan
This is a really good analogy, except you made one mistake: it’s not difficult at all to design something to be accessible and respectful of privacy as long as you do it from the start. If you try to build something inaccessible and privacy-invading then get caught and have to retrofit accessibility and privacy at the last minute to avoid fines and lawsuits, that’s when it becomes difficult.
And you see this exact mistake crop up in the Stop Killing Games criticism as well. People say that it’s difficult because they are thinking about taking the status quo and retrofitting longevity. For instance, trying to retroactively obtain licenses to distribute components that they didn’t originally have. When in practice, the effect of a law like this is that it would push game developers to make the right choices up front like picking appropriately licensed components, so there’s no barrier to keeping the game alive when the time comes to cease support.
It might also have escaped your attention that the EU was perfectly willing to create accessibility and privacy regulations, so if you are likening Stop Killing Games to these things then it stands to reason that this is not a reason for the EU to avoid Stop Killing Games legislation.
Moreover, I have to also pay a company just to be my representative in the EU and have a stupid email address that is completely useless.
I don't know these things definitely don't make my appreciate regulations, and I think if you want to add more layers of regulation, you have to be really thoughtful about them, because often like DRM, eventually they screw the little guys more than they screw the bad actors.
If privacy regulations can break your business, then I think there’s a very high chance what you are doing is exactly the sort of thing the regulations are explicitly designed to discourage.
> now there's a whole CMP TCF2 protocol you have to implement.
That’s exactly what I’m talking about. There’s no regulation saying you have to implement that. That’s a consequence of you making the choice to trade user data. Somebody who does not choose to do that has much less work to do. This is an example of the regulations working as intended. You’re supposed to see the friction and make better choices up front to avoid it, not make the same choices then complain about the friction.
> eventually they screw the little guys more than they screw the bad actors.
Little guys are often the bad actors.
Anyway, the discussion was about the harms of regulations and why developers would resist these. I personally know several indie mobile developers that had games that their core business model was ad monetization, and the regulation made these businesses less viable, and it's likely that players who enjoyed these kind of games, will now see less of these indie games.
I personally think this regulation does more harm then good for small businesses and players alike. I think legeslation has to be super careful when it comes to regulating businesses, anytime I had to deal with compliance around accessibility, privacy, transparency etc. I saw how intentions were good, but execution was absolutely terrible, with so many holes that the ones who benefit the most are the big companies that can workaround these clauses, while good intentioned small businesses need to spend money on compliance before they even know if the business is going to be viable.
Are we supposed to just accept that games will die because of the profits of some game dev studios?
> I saw how intentions were good, but execution was absolutely terrible, with so many holes that the ones who benefit the most are the big companies that can workaround these clauses
So we are supposed to not do anything...
For example, it makes a lot of sense to regulate gasoline so there won't be any lead in it. It also makes sense to standartize and simplify loans which can also have severe impact on people. I don't think it makes sense to regulate games to that degree, which are merely a form of entertainment and have no severe consequences on people, especially not SKG.
Unfortunately, it only works on paper. In reality publishers can add stuff after the release when people already paid money for it (classic bait and switch). So buying only "good" games does not guarantee that they will stay that way. Also, we did try "applying pressure", it didn't work, that's why we are here currently.
> I don't think it makes sense to regulate games to that degree
Nobody is asking to regulate the games themselves, only how they are distributed after their end of life.
> which are merely a form of entertainment and have no severe consequences on people
People make money using specific videogames. So there are consequences of shutting down games for good.
Personally, for all I care, even as a game-dev, I don't mind if there'd be a law that would allow players to modify and even reverse engineers previous versions of the game for the sole purpose of playing the game.
This kind of regulation demands nothing from the game developers, doesn't force them to comply with anything, and doesn't incur any additional costs. Maybe there'd be some tiny loss of revenue, but it's arguably miniscule if the games are already abandoned.
It pretty much already happening with games like the C&C Generals that have pirated abandonware versions.
Most of the demands I've seen from the SKG crowd demand actual laws that define what developers must provide players, instead they should just legalize reverse engineering.
That is indeed a case, and potential solutions has been discussed. The main idea is that games that have already been made do not need to comply with this, so they don't need to change anything. Moreover, some videogames have already been released with middleware stripped out of them. From the top of my head: Doom 3, Blietzkrieg. So you can work around that.
> I don't mind if there'd be a law that would allow players to modify and even reverse engineers previous versions of the game for the sole purpose of playing the game
To my knowledge, you can already do that in most jurisdictions. That's why there are a lot of decompilation projects that started in recent years.
> This kind of regulation demands nothing from the game developers
The problem is that for games with online components you also require server binaries, which you don't always have access to. So developers would need to provide at least those binaries. So unfortunately even in this case there will be something that developers must do.
> C&C Generals
That's a good example because EA made source code available last year for most C&C games. So people have been improving unofficial versions.
> Most of the demands I've seen from the SKG crowd demand actual laws that define what developers must provide players
SKG itself does not demand anything specific, that's the idea. People who support the initiative do provide some potential options, but I don't think they are forcing it on anyone.
Likewise, the legal risk for small indie games here rounds to zero. Most such games will, at worst, lose access to online leaderboards if their developers shut them down.
These already harmed a lot of small mobile game companies, while the bigger mobile companies had much better means to deal with these.
I personally paid over $10K for different services just to comply, disregarding the loss of revenue over this compliance.
Trust me I would have loved to throwaway this dependency on these platforms, I don't enjoy paying for ads. The market is not pretty, but there's a reason for why it's the way it is. For some reasons, players prefer downloading games for free and then paying potentially hundreds to thousands of dollars on IAPs, rather than everyone paying $5 for a game. I would have preferred it to be the latter personally, but the market doesn't seem to want to act this way.
I buy a VPS. I apt install nginx. Is it okay that by default, opening http://IP/index.html logs the IP address to /etc/log/nginx/access.log? Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe yes but I need a privacy policy (for an empty index.html). Maybe I need to ask a lawyer (who usually errs on side of caution) because people have been arguing about it for 10 years (and please don't answer here). And in the end, even if I didn't need to do anything, it sure is _some_ nonzero drain of my resources to have think about it at all (completely ignoring whether it's justified or not).
- That data processing always requires consent. There are exactly six reasons for storing or processing data: consent, contract fulfillment, legal compliance, vital interests of a natural person, public interest/official authority, or legitimate interest. Collecting IP addresses can be a legitimate interest, but:
- The real interesting question is what you do with the IP addresses after they're stored in a file. Securing your server is a legitimate interest. Tracking your users is generally not. Having lawfully collected data is not a carte blanche to do anything you choose with it.
Yes. IP addresses by themselves are not PII and may be logged indefinitely. It's only after you start correlating them with other shit that you're collecting that they become subject to GDPR.
Same for cookies really. If you *only* operate a shopping cart, you don't have to display a cookie notice for "only technically required cookies". The point of the cookie notice is to dark pattern users into granting more access or just to annoy them enough that they continue not caring about privacy.
I absolutely agree that the practices SKG are fighting against are pretty abusive and that it is right and proper to restrict those practices, but I also understand why people see the appeal in anti-e2ee laws.
The thing is, I have a good-enough understanding of cryptography to see why those laws are a terrible idea, and I’m infuriated by how clueless their supporters are. I’m self-aware enough to realise that I might the clueless one here and that me not seeing any legitimate issue with SKG doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
A decade or so ago I (among millions) signed to abolish daylight saving time. Still waiting for that heh.
Western Australia has had four referenda on the topic since 1975, each time preceded by a trial period where daylight saving was observed, and every time it has been rejected and the state has switched back to no DST.
If you'd back a politician with a track record that bad on any promise, that is probably something telling more about you than the politician.
> I wish he'd sign that executive order and tilt that windmill in the courts instead of the stuff he is pushing.
You say you were very clear, but I genuinely don't understand what about that you disagree with.
None of the games from the 90s and early 2000's required authenticating with a launder. They just worked and this is why those games are still playable to date.
Those same games that had multi-player allowed for downloading a self-hosted server.
Enemy Territory is a prime example. The game would still be playable even with out ID Software releasing the source code.
GOG is built upon legacy games that don't require a launcher. Politicians in the EU have been bought and paid for. President exists and is not being applied.
who cares. you can still pirate if you so choose (at the risk of your data if you do it on the same PC).
you pirating is basically taking part in a distribution, the host simply doesn't do it with a company but a nick (digital loophole*). but the distribution happens no less and the license of right-to-use never covered this to begin with.
all these cases are digital loopholes: companies being able to shut down servers and forcing people to move on.
we need these laws.
Making games playable is not proportionate but mass surveillance of private messages is complete fine.
It’s all shovelware. It’s all the same crap over and over. There are plenty of non live service games being released every day, buy those instead. If a game is actually important to people they’ll figure out a way to play it (as people did with WoW classic before classic).
The idea that we should spend time and energy to regulate the big studios (who will just find loopholes anyway) instead of just supporting the indies who are making good stuff is wild to me.
I don't like the idea of "they will just find loopholes anyway", that seems defeatist. "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas."
I wish people started thinking of good regulation as a technical problem as much as it is a social one.
I don't see how games won't just charge you a $0.01 "subscription" that lasts 5 years or various other such sidesteps. it'll just make everything more annoying.
That's very grim... I'm on the completely different side, majority of games I've been playing recently are fairly old.
Nice job regurgitating point-for-point all of the talking points that the publishers spoon-fed you.
Subscription businesses is simply a usage over time. That's the troubling thing here. You don't really own games physically as we did during the 80th and 90th.
Update-mania and buggy games were introduced first as consequence of the internet, then came the registration phase and after that the subsciption model.
Why am I mixed? Did I keep my machines from back then? The SNES, the i486 etc? What if the hardware has an defect 30 years after? Eternal rights?
They are in no way guaranteed, in either reality.
I was a semi-pro gamer for some time around 99-01, being in the top 50 of the Age of Empires II: AoK ladder at the legendary ZONE in RM games. I had several smurf accounts leveled up into the ladder, to sneak into games without being tied to my clan and even clans (CN, Myll, ZXK just to name a few).
I had to cut ties, because of the impact on my university curriculum. I remember the huge fallout it took on DBD_Jinx who kind of quit the game from one day to another without notice due to - if I remember correctly - being even kicked out of university due to being to heavily involved with the game all day. He was a notorious FLUSHER everywhere and every time which was unimaginable at the time but beat almost everyone being really an excellent executioner and top notch player even in late castle, on water etc. - and this took time and a toll.
After AoK I never touched a game with any potential to being addicted. Never. I didn't play Warcraft, which I was a top notch player when it was called Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness and came on a CD in 1995, and this lead me to AoK - an online game.
People should consider, what they are doing online. A sarcastic colleague once put it this way: People changing bytes on a server in a cloud, wow...
He had a point. Games are fun, but not for ever, sadly. I would love to play AoK like back then and while there is the chance now, I still refuse to take part in any online action at all. I took part in a few LAN party games - yes, we brought our laptops and played like it is 1998!
But that's it. So I am mixed. Online gaming feeds more and more addiction and that's why I sometimes think: a server that gets shut down is like a cold turkey for some.
For this you have options: emulators, FPGAs, fixing the original hardware. So as long as you have your copy of the game, there is a way for you to play it.
But with modern games that is not the case anymore. Publisher can decide on a whim that they don't want to support their game and shut down the servers, which renders the whole game unplayable. It even happens with singleplayer games. This is not OK and should not be accepted as the norm.
I see their main point as: it should still be possible to (in some way) have access to what you pay for after servers shut down.
Some games an online requirement makes sense (like where you play online with other people), but in some cases the online requirement is for a single player only game, where the server shutdown makes the game unplayable. -- Cases like that seem absurd.
Every new band ever has to compete against the beatles.
Because if people voted on every single regulation you'd be at the ballot box five times a day.
If one was actually interested in actual democracy one would fix that misinformation asymmetry.
On top of that, there are also instruments that help the voters track whether politicians are engaging in corrupt lobbyism like voting records + donation / campaign contribution records, though few countries do that to a degree that it forms a cohesive anti-corruption framework. None of those measures exist for individual voters.
Corruption by definition is intentional, compare getting hoodwinked by "misinformation". Curious what "measures [] for individual voters" even means with regards to voters. A voter cannot be corrupt since they only represent themselves.
There’s interestingly all this hoopla and indirection, tracking corruption and misaligned priorities, even now adding the burden to the feeble voter mind to not only stay clear of misinformation campaigns but to watch out for corruption in their own representatives. This seems ripe for simplification.
In order to play an actuall "Local Area Network" game, you first need to connect to the online Xbox Service. Only then will "Multiplayer" be available as an option and only then you can actually select "Local Area Network" as the "server region" for the match.
All for an updated re-release of a game from 1999.
I was at the AoE 2 DE launch LAN event at a Microsoft Store with big YouTubers and everything. They could not play LAN because right at launch, the online servers crashed due to the load. No one played a multiplayer game at this LAN...
All the publisher would have to do is to create a "mini self-hosted server" application and provide it and they would follow the law on this.
It's really not that complicated. Not "free", of course, but it's not exactly expensive either if you plan to do that from the moment you write your first line of code.
> All the publisher would have to do is to create a "mini self-hosted server" application and provide it and they would follow the law on this
You’re making a huge assumption here both about the scope of the law, and about how straightforward this is to do. I’ve worked in games where we could drop a server binary over the fence an that would be fine. I’ve also worked on games that have required a bunch of different standalone services just for core logic - running it requires a combination of dynamodb, Kafka, a few microservices on lambda, and massive third party dependencies. Getting a “mini self hosted server application” out of this is a rewrite.
> but it's not exactly expensive either if you plan to do that from the moment you write your first line of code.
The vast majority of games use existing technologies. First line of code was 30 years ago for any unreal game, for example. This effectively bans any third party non redistributable libraries (of which there are many), using many open source licensed projects for the backend.
What if I rely on steam, or epic for P2P and they shutter the service? What if playfab discontinue their offering, or AWS decide to remove a service that our “mini self hosted server” relies upon. Games aren’t some magical piece of technology, they’re just software like everything else.
The initiative has no problem with this as far as I know; the backend being an overengineered mess doesn't make it non-compliant with what SKG wants.
I've worked on game backends that would've trivially complied with just a basic executable blob + MySQL, and ones that would've required someone to run 10+ services on AWS (yes, it was entirely stuck on AWS).
With that said I don't think anyone would really be developing things this way in a world where they actually took this type of compliance seriously, and there is no real upside to hyperfocusing like that on third-party platform solutions and so on.
3rd party libraries I agree about, I think it'd force people to actually do things in-house instead, which could be quite the ask for some of them (some of the libraries, and also some of the companies, who sometimes do not possess the talent to solve harder problems, or create their own things).
SKG wants games to be "playable" and doesn't define what playable is. Is a multiplayer chess game with no AI "playable" if you can boot into the menu? Is TLOU remastered playable if the multiplayer is turned off but the SP is still playable? Is Trackmania playable without UGC sharing and leaderboards? I would say "no" to all of the above, FWIW.
> With that said I don't think anyone would really be developing things this way in a world where they actually took this type of compliance seriously, and there is no real upside to hyperfocusing like that on third-party platform solutions and so on.
I think that what will actually happen is three things. 1) Many small studios that try things will just nope out. 2) Studios will switch to the Hollywood model of spinning up an entity per game to tack all the liability onto. There's no real reason to do this now, but if there's actual liability for it, that will change overnight. 3) Larger studios will split out online development from game development into separate entities.
I don't think it's hyperfocusing to say "there's a massive hole in this idea", I think it's dismissive of SKG to ignore people who work in this spaces concerns (ironically, it appears this is one of the reasons the EU commission isn't proceeding here, because SKG haven't engaged with industry groups to come up with a way to make this work).
Which is completely fine since they're not a legislative body. Instead of settling on a hard line, they're leaving this part open to be defined in collaboration with lawmakers and the industry. Isn't that exactly what so many detractors are asking for?
Let's be honest, SKG wouldn't have fewer critics if they chose a specific definition of "playable". I'd even argue that the industry would be opposed far more strongly.
Arguably a multiplayer game is playable when, given that you've convinced other people to join you, you can play against them on a self-hosted backend.
With that said, I don't really think the lack of a clear definition from the initiative as to what "playable" means is a problem; this is something that should be hashed out with the relevant parties. You seem to acknowledge that some level of discussion should be had with them, so it's unclear to me why you think somehow SKG should come with a fully formed basically-legislation to the table, when arguably that's not needed or useful for actual lawmakers.
> I don't think it's hyperfocusing to say "there's a massive hole in this idea"
The hyperfocusing I was referring to was making your backend as if you owe AWS/GCP/other-cloud-provider money, i.e. being stuck literally on exactly that platform and maximizing your usage of their services. It's not a great way of making things to begin with, and an even worse way when you actually have to be accountable for things being runnable over time.
One of the biggest issues the industry will face is that it puts pressure on its rapid decline in competency (the same one created and enabled by the things you allude to as being roadblocks for any initiatives around keeping games around after service ends).
They might solve those types of things with interesting accounting solutions like the ones you referred to, but those can be legislated against as well; liability circumvention is only a magic wand if you allow it to be.
> it appears this is one of the reasons the EU commission isn't proceeding here
I think nothing is being done in this particular case because there are groups that have talked quite a bit to the people deciding whether things should be done, not really because of any supposed lack of interaction from SKG. It seems naïve (or driven by other motives) to me to think otherwise.
But you don't have to design the backend this way. Especially if you know that you will have to share the binaries when the support for the game ends.
> This effectively bans any third party non redistributable libraries (of which there are many), using many open source licensed projects for the backend
Some games that have been open sourced by the developers solved this issue by replacing such library calls with stubs. I think this is an acceptable compromise.
>What if I rely on steam, or epic for P2P and they shutter the service?
If you still support the game, you can replace those services to keep the game running. If you don't support it (or decided that you don't want to keep supporting it because of the service shutdown), then you just release it with those service calls, and the community will replace them (if they want to of course).
You’re calling for legislating software architecture for a subset of software that is different to how it works everywhere else in the tech industry.
> Some games that have been open sourced by the developers solved this issue by replacing such library calls with stubs. I think this is an acceptable compromise.
The other commenter hit on the moving goalposts - I agree with him and not going to go into that more.
> If you don't support it (or decided that you don't want to keep supporting it because of the service shutdown), then you just release it with those service calls, and the community will replace them (if they want to of course).
I think this shows a misunderstanding of what’s actually involved here. If we can rely on the community to patch in missing calls, (and implement the logic behind those calls) then this law doesn’t do anything - the community are free to reverse engineer the service it relies on. If I make a chess game, and the community remake the matchmaker but without ELO that’s bordering on unplayable - in my mind it’s as bad as the game not existing anymore.
Not really, it will be the consequence of requiring the game to be given to the community after the EOL.
> the community are free to reverse engineer the service it relies on
While that is true, it is much harder than receiving the code with the most logic intact. We already do reverse engineer the binaries, including the server protocols, so we know how hard it is. And that's why we know that it's not the way to go.
"I'm not calling for it, but if it happens to be the only way to achieve what I want then so be it".
> While that is true, it is much harder than receiving the code with the most logic intact. We already do reverse engineer the binaries, including the server protocols, so we know how hard it is. And that's why we know that it's not the way to go.
But for many games, the logic _is_ in the remote service calls. Who decides what calls are reversible and which aren't? In a chess game, matchmaking is probably the most important part, for example.
Again, I'm not advocating for some specific architecture. There is more than one way to make a game hostable by players.
> But for many games, the logic _is_ in the remote service calls
Exactly, and this is the issue - you shut down the server and the game becomes bricked.
I am not even sure that's true, even in the limited scope of "we've already built this jumble of micro services that our thin client requires to do anything and a rewrite is impossible".
I think the real goal of this would simply be clearer communication with consumers. Therefore if you are selling an inherently temporary access pass to your server, say so. Don't call it the same thing as someone else who is selling a standalone or self-hostable software binary.
I don't see it regulating software architecture so much as it is the beginnings of trying to make legal categories of software, which I'm not opposed to doing.
The few examples you point out as "open source released with stubs" are also usually games that are decades old and cultural landmarks, where there was economic incentive from the right holders (good PR) to release them (e.g. Quake). This isn't tennable for your typical game that has to shut down online services because it's financially unsustainable.
> "open source released with stubs" are also usually games that are decades old and cultural landmarks
Not necessarily.
Edit: the goalpost is "the games should remain playable after the publisher stop supporting it". It hasn't moved an inch. So I'm not sure what you are talking about...
> : the goalpost is "the games should remain playable after the publisher stop supporting it". It hasn't moved an inch. So I'm not sure what you are talking about...
Many people (myself included) have absolutely no problem with that in principle. It's how do you do it that we have a problem with. Saying "just have every video game use the architecture that I have in my head that works, and isolate them from how all other software works" isn't practical.
I did not remove anything from my comment. Just added a statement since the alleged "goalpost moving" was referenced twice in the thread, so I had to reread my posts to check if it was really there. Hence my confusion.
> Many people (myself included) have absolutely no problem with that in principle
You can propose your own solution to the problem, not just criticize what other people say.
> just have every video game use the architecture that I have in my head
I'm not proposing any specific architecture.
The developer is the one who should think about costs. You shouldn't force it on consumers.
> If you are fine with making game development an even riskier financial endeavour than it already is
Yes, I'm absolutely fine with it. We already have a lot of games to play, and if developers have to be very considerate before making something and the number of released games decreases because of this, so be it.
Don't make your game be a spaghetti mess of dependencies.
Or.
When you decide on your dependencies, make sure they are compatible with the regulations. The chances of middleware developers not updating their middleware and/or licenses to comply with these regulations are practically zero: there will 100% be market need for compliant middleware and others to provide it, so the existing middleware developers will update theirs too.
> What if I rely on steam, or epic for P2P and they shutter the service?
That's the easiest of the bunch because Steam already has at least one opensource reimplementation of the API (probably multiple) so all you have to do is drop a DLL in your game's directory and you get Steam independence.
This is a good point. For some games, complying with a Stop Killing Games law would be easy. For those games, the developers could simply drop a server binary over the fence like you mentioned. For other games, complying with a Stop Killing Games law would be much more difficult. For those other games, the developers would have to put in significant effort or refund customers once the game is killed.
That being said, I think that what we are talking about here is short-term pain for long-term gain. In the short-term, adaptation will be difficult for some developers, but those developers will eventually learn how to make games that allow players to host their own servers on their own infrastructure.
Not really an apt comparison (since you mentioned P2P), but providing something like HLDS should solve this, no? Counter-Strike 1.6 has long ended its development but it has (or had) a prolific community servers to this day. If Playfab, AWS remove that service, just use your own hardware.
It means the customer needs the option to run their own servers.
This only affects AAA game studios that produce micro transaction slop and live services. The exact same that are lobbying against any sort of regulation.
The gaming industry will be fine.
So those games are unaffected regardless of this law.
> This only affects AAA game studios that produce micro transaction slop and live services. The exact same that are lobbying against any sort of regulation.
F2P live service games are specifically excluded from this though, which presumably is what you mean by micro transaction slop. This affects every game, from a 1 man developer who uses steam for p2p all the way up to activision and call of duty. The groups hit hardest by this are going to be small-medium developers who are just trying to build a game, not Ubisoft (who are the reason for instigating this whole thing).
How so? Smaller developers don't usually build games that require huge online components that will be hard to release to the public. That's mostly AAA publishers that do so (at least I can't remember the opposite from the top of my head).
Yes, they do. Small developers disproportionally have to rely on online services to make their multiplayer games work to a playable standard acceptable to the users, as they can't afford to write them from scratch (and couldn't even afford to do the devops work that comes with a self-hosted alternative).
Example: PEAK, on of _the_ multiplayer hits of last year from a small studio is built on top of Photon[0] for their multiplayer. If you were to remove that component you might as well completely rewrite the game.
How did studios deal with multiplayer in the 1990-2010? That's right, server binary and in-game server browser. These days you don't even need to enter an IP address, just use Steam to invite/join friends. Using third-party or cloud online services is just pure laziness/convenience, and allowing for players to host their games is not rocket science.
“awful experience”? That’s a very very surprising thing to read. My personal experience has been the exact opposite. I’ve personally experienced two types of games:
1. Games where you can choose a server manually (i.e., by using a server browser or by manually entering an IP address).
2. Games where you have let some sort of matchmaking system choose a server for you.
For games in the first category, I end up building up a favorites list of servers where I fit in and am appreciated. For games in the second category, I am not able to do that. As a result, I get a lot of hate.
I love being cheery and spreading positive vibes in voice chat. Some people like it when I do that. Other people hate it when I do that because they think that my behavior is gay and because they hate gay people. For games in the first category, I am able to avoid the haters by playing on servers where haters are not welcome. For games in the second category, I have to just hope that I get lucky. In practice, I end up being unlucky so often that it makes me never want to play games that fall into the second category.
So from my perspective, the older way of doing things was not an awful experience. It’s the newer way of doing things (the way that allows for games to be killed) that has been an awful experience.
> TF2 server browser, where many of the good servers were also not publicly listed and head to be discovered outside of the game is also not really a tractable option.
I love TF2. I play it all the time. I didn’t know that there was a bunch of good servers that are not publicly listed and had to be discovered outside of the game. Could you link to some of them? I would love to check them out.
You're just spreading FUD.
Minecraft has mandatory hosted servers that are so non-trivial to host that it spawned a $XXmillion industry of third-party hosting, and first party hosting is also a paid service. Also bad netcode in the Java edition.
I'm not sure if I'd call either of those "just fine". That system also only works for games that are able to attract some minimum viable community where some enthusiasts volunteer to host any servers at all. Great for a really long-lived community, bad for any new game trying to make a splash.
And what the hell has netcode to do with who runs the servers? So all the cloud-hosted games never suffer from jitter, latency, bad routing, network congestion? Again, it's just FUD.
I'm not convinced that that's the case. If you're talking about cloud providers then the cost can become very high very quickly, so smaller developers have to carefully manage the budget. To my knowledge, cloud services are usually used for simple stuff like logs and analytics, and games don't really need that to play the game.
Also, don't forget that it's not just multiplayer games. Singleplayer games suffer from this as well.
edit:
> To my knowledge, cloud services are usually used for simple stuff like logs and analytics
Respectfully, you’re wrong here and this is the problem that me and many others have with this line of defense for SKG. No small developers who are managing their budget tightly are storing logs on AWS for analysis after the fact and paying for it. They’re using services like Sentry that do it for free or for $19/months. They’re using services like playfab for parties, vivox for voice chat, flex match for Matchmaking. Those services are free for small amounts of use that 90% of games would fit under.
There is no guarantee that they did!!! Yes, the examples we are pointing out (typical "friendslop" games from the last years) made bank, and should be able to afford to afford and EOL path.
However for every successful game that uses those technologies there are ~100 that "didn't make it", or barely broke even that are now also forced to do additional work on something they either post-hoc now was financially unfeasible, or have to do up-front work on something where it's a gamble whether it will be financially feasible.
In my personal opinion, completely downplaying the effort and financial reality that comes with making games compliant, and based on that creating carveouts for e.g. sub-$100k-revenue games was the downfall of SKG. If they would have made an effort to recognize that, they would be able to mobilize a large base of the indie developer community as well.
I don't think anyone is downplaying the effort of making a videogame that is both easy to host for the small developers and for the community. But unfortunately developers themselves often choose to pursue financial goals disregarding everything else. So it's understandable that gamers are not happy and demanding some solution. And that the industry is trying to push back.
They may have never made any money to begin with, as they ran out of money during the development phase of the game because they were trying to comply with the regulation, and never got to release the game. Regulation almost always places a higher proportional burden on the smaller players, while larger players can afford it, which is why sensible regulation has carveouts for smaller players.
> maybe there will a lot of lag, maybe something will break. But it is still better than not being able to play the game at all
How is that better? A multiplayer game with awful lag isn't enjoyable anymore, and a game without joy is just a chore.
I don't believe it. This is not the biggest spending point when making a videogame. If a developer uses this as an excuse, there was probably something else wrong with the development.
> How is that better?
Well, being able to play a game is better than not being able to play the game. I've played multiplayer games with high lag, you can get used to this. Especially if you want to play the game. Also, community can fix some stuff on their own, but only if they have something to work with.
If the law were to be passed, Photon would at the maximum be incentivized to produce a self-hostable API-compatible alternative that would be neutered to such a degree that Games still qualify as "playable" on paper but would be unenjoyable to actually play. More likely, they won't do anything, as they are not the game developer and not responsible for compliance.
Small multiplayer “friendslop” games - things like Lethal Fompany, Peak, Totally Reliable Delivery service. They’ve been smash hits, wildly popular but I can definitely see a world where those games just don’t get made when you add a new layer of liability, potentially in perpetuity.
There is literally zero reason that Lethal Company needs cloud services for their servers, or for it not to allow players to host their games. EOS & co. are golden handcuffs, and designing the multiplayer system from day 1 with preservation in mind is not that much more work. Of course Epic wants you to use their easy solution, it's called vendor lock in.
Regarding the optional multiplayer modes - the developers will probably not use some complex architecture for this, so giving it to the community will not be that hard. Also there are multiplayer games that do support community servers out of the box, so it's not an issue to make a game like this.
On the other hand, actions like picket lines produce a clear relationship between the issue (look at the sign) and the action. Contacting advertisers and shareholders to get them to pull out their funding also has a direct effect, and connects more cleanly the effect to the cause.
>Ubisoft has released its financial results for the full 25-26 fiscal year, reporting a sharp decline in revenue and net bookings, down 21.8% and 17.4% year-over-year (YoY), respectively, due to the "softer new release schedule" and new operating model.
I think a reasonable middle ground here is to just have EU mandate something similar for games. To receive an A rating the game has to be installable and playable fully offline, for example, and so on.
They could allow for publishers to guarantee a minimum support period, with full refunds guaranteed if the publisher does not honor that. So an E rating may be a game that's guaranteed playable for 2 years and requires online connection to play.
Then those who purchase can make informed decisions. Do I want to buy this game with a rating that signals the game may stop working at any point the publisher decides?
Vote with your wallet. Do not hesitate to boycott.
Whether the game works offline, and until when the servers are guaranteed, is one part. But the savegames and progression data should also belong to the user.
The game is made by the studio, sure, but the save file is the part I construct by playing. It is my time, my choices, my progress, my world state and my memories.
So I would add a clear principle that the publisher should not be able to kidnap the user's save data.
I want Non-free Software to suck as much as possible to give people more reasons to use Free/Open-source Software, which can't be killed.
Serious question not snark
But almost everywhere else it seems to be just corporations pushing for laws against other corporations, like with Epic/Tinder etc against Apple/Google etc
The disappointing part is the voluntary industry code. Publishers are not being asked to run servers forever, only to avoid making paid games completely unusable after shutdown.
At what point does buying a game become nothing more than renting access until the publisher changes its mind?
Or is this one of the good ones(tm)
We can still play the NES version of Mario (1985), but we can't play Evolve (2015), Anthem (2019), Concord (2024), etc.
NO DAY 0 patches,
free of bugs that prevent in any way completing the game or cause serious annoyance,
a way to have a digitally bought game made offline, and play offline.
If it's an online game, then after X years, or before abandonment by the studio release a vm that holds the server code, so the addicts could host their own shit.
That's all. But it was fucked from the get go, maybe literally started by a lobbyist. Or simply Ross Scott was simply didn't know what he was doing.
video games would normally distract people who would otherwise remain politically inactive
when these establishments attempt to insert their propaganda and control mechanisms into these industries, it infuriates millions of people who just want to be left alone
To be fair to him it's more bad coordination or bad prep but it weakened the argument so much in my opinion.
What power? Power to save games from becoming unplayable on the whim?
Shall I go on?
CU: I consent.
GD: I consent.
EU: Isn't there someone you forgot to ask?
"Oh, won't someone think of the gamers?"
It's a bit of inference on my part, but here's my bottom line: the conduct SKG is lobbying against is permitted by the contracts which game sellers and customers have agreed to, presumably. Otherwise, a smart instantiation of the SKG idea would be bringing class actions for breaches of contract, I guess?
So I agree, nobody is trying to block people from making games certain ways, including in this sort of Mission Impossible tape way. That would be weird and draconian to outlaw. But I don't know how to interpret SKG other than to be outlawing the sale of such revocable/spontaneously self-destructing game services, which is to say outlawing the contracting between customers and sellers to exchange money for services usable under such terms.
I think a specimen case would be useful to understand. The infamous one seems to be The Crew. Presumably SKG would seek to outlaw something about the conduct of Ubisoft there, presumably the revocation or destruction of the service. Equally presumably, the right to revocation was in the terms that everyone signed. So either, the law trumps the contract, or the contract was unlawful in the first place. This effectively forbids some kinds of contract.
Anyway, that's just my interpretation, so if I'm thinking stupid, I hope my thoughts are laid bare, and that I have not lost your patience, so that you may poke out my errors.
Yes, that's the case. But the absence of guarantees is not very specific, which opens a door for publishers to just drop support on a whim. It's not an issue with titles that have no online components, since you can just keep playing them. But a lot of games nowadays do require online connection, even singleplayer ones. So a publisher shutting down the servers for such game will render the game unplayable in any way. This is the crux, and this is what SKG is trying to solve.
> the conduct SKG is lobbying against is permitted by the contracts which game sellers and customers have agreed to, presumably
Unfortunately, publishers can change the agreements. They can promise you 10 year support for a game, and then drop support for this game one year after release (see Anthem as an example; Concord is even more obvious). This should definitely not happen.
> I don't know how to interpret SKG other than to be outlawing the sale of such revocable/spontaneously self-destructing game services
You can still sell them and deny access to the game after shutting it down, you just need to be prepared for legal actions. So no, nobody wants to outlaw the production of such games (at least nobody from the initiative talks about it in such way).
> The infamous one seems to be The Crew
Yes, it's the most popular. But there are hundreds of games like that that are already dead and cannot be played. You might think it's a very small number compared to overall number of games that have been ever released, but it will increase. Also, Ubisoft themselves told us multiple times that they don't want gamers to own the games.
> This effectively forbids some kinds of contract
It's nothing new. For instance, you cannot make a game that formats your system drive when you die in-game. Nobody is stopping you from developing such game, but you will be open to legal actions, since it can be considered malware. Even if you warn the players beforehand - it's still a malware. So the argument "they agreed to this" is not very sound. Like with real world Russian roulette - it's not OK to shoot someone just because they agreed to it.
Also contracts should not contradict the laws. But to prove if such practice contradicts the existing laws is quite hard as we can currently see.
Like,
1. Let make cocaine legal to sell
2. Say to people 'Stop giving money to drug deallers if you have a problem with the arrangement.'
Control behavior by regulating the intermediary. Figure out what the intermediary publishers rely on is, and regulate the intermediary or transactions to that intermediary
This works within any legal system anywhere and just requires a little inspiration
at least, I can do it anywhere, so just reach out
The "despite" certainly creates an interesting expectation, though.
Basically you said that Belarus is democratic country because 51% percent people voted for today's dictator.